Something Old
by
Chris Dee

Then
Again, Maybe the
Frenchman Isn’t The Problem After All

Gordon’s plans for a frank chat on the delicate subject of
“Bruce Wayne:
Item 2” were overturned when he reached the manor and encountered a prime
example of “Bruce Wayne: Item 1.”

There was some kind of gourmet extravaganza in
progress, and some puffed up headwaiter-type met him at the door and said
deliveries should be brought round to the back! Alfred intervened before
it got ugly, and Gordon was escorted past a table of more headwaiters that all
looked him up and down and sniffed like he was being allowed to contaminate the
air they breathed.

Alfred led him past the closed doors to the library where he normally met
with Bruce, and showed him instead into a small sitting room Gordon had never seen before.
The butler made a vague apology about some wine event going on in the main
rooms, but if Gordon would wait here for a bit, Bruce would be along shortly.

“Wonderful,” Gordon muttered, “I’ll just
wait in the lobby and try not to get my miserable working class germs on the
Persian carpet.”

“Oh dear,” Alfred gasped softly.

Gordon looked up petulantly, but saw Alfred’s disapproving gaze was
directed not at him, but at the library across the hall.
Through the now-open doors, several figures could be seen:
a stocky man in black with a hand-held camera, a second man with a
microphone, two men with machine guns, two more with gas canisters.
Between the guy with the microphone and the ones with the guns stood two more
figures: Harley Quinn and the Joker.

“DEAD/NOT DEAD Pilot, Take 1!” Harley
Quinn announced happily.

“Hi there,” Joker addressed the camera lens eagerly.
“Have you heard that I’m dead? Too often, a popular figure such as myself
wakes up one morning to find some nobody news writer trying to make a name for
himself by killing off his betters.” Joker paused here to take a gun from
one of the armed thugs and sprayed the ceiling above the cameraman with gunfire.

“Just where they get the balls…” and with
that he smashed the butt between the cameraman’s legs “…I don’t know. But
they do!”

“Puddin’, I don’t think that’s a good
idea,” Harley observed, as the cameraman crumpled into a coughing
whimpering ball. “With the camera on the floor like that, they’ll just see
feet.”

Under the best of circumstances, it was difficult getting away from a crowd to
change into Batman. With the enhanced failsafes he had in place for the
festival, it was all but impossible.

“Let me illustrate the difference,” Joker was saying, pulling a
terrified Anatole from the crowd. “This
is not dead,” and he smiled at the camera.
“This is dead,” and he pointed the gun at Anatole’s temple.
“And then I’ll blow your brains out,” Joker explained politely. “Okay
then, everybody, ready for a take?”

“Have you heard that I’m dead? Too
often, a figure such as myself wakes up one morning to find some hack writer
trying to make a name for himself by killing off his betters…”

“You tell’em, Mistah J!”

“CUT! WHO SAID YOU COULD TALK?”

Joker thundered at Harley and looked around the cooking demonstration for a
suitable implement to express his displeasure.
He found it in some hot oil, which he flung at his devoted sidekick.
Harley had never learned to contain her enthusiastic outbursts - but she
had learned to duck when they brought on one of these tantrums.
This she did, and the oil meant for her went flying past and landed on a
prize leg of lamb a la Anatole, splattering the creator’s trousers with
hot grease and dripping more onto his shoes.

“Hmm, Count Franco de Bat-Bat,” he muttered dryly.
“Didn’t know he was here.”

Then
he put on a jovial manner to greet his accursed enemy with equal
sophistication:

“Count Francula! I didn’t see
you back there! Lurking in the
shadows, eh, but you’re so good at that. HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

“It is pronounced ‘François’ si vous plait,”
corrected Count Franco, still oblivious to the fact that he was talking to a
deranged killer.

“Well, however you say it, Frenchie, it was good of you to turn out for
the pilot episode. I figured we wouldn’t see you ‘til sweeps week!
Mon FrancoBat, you are too good to me!”

And with that the Joker saluted, grabbed each of François’s arms and
kissed both his cheeks. Then he
turned abruptly and screamed…

“HAR-LEEEY, TAAAKE 4!”

Alfred tried, unsuccessfully, to get Gordon to sneak out a back corridor to
summon help. Gordon tried,
unsuccessfully, to get Alfred to do the same.
Each man felt they were in a superior strategic position to stay and
fight the good fight:

Alfred knew the secrets of Wayne Manor and
assumed Gordon did not.

Gordon was a retired policeman and assumed
Alfred was a hapless civilian.

Harley needed a mirror to straighten her hair before filming and assumed the
little brown door behind the bookcase was a washroom. She opened it to
find Alfred and Gordon gesturing wildly at each other to do something.

“Puddin, come look!” she squealed
excitedly, “I found two more!”

Jean Paul watched the scene unfold from the surveillance monitors in the
Batcave. The madman was playing one of his incomprehensible games, and it
was bound to turn deadly if he couldn’t get up there and put a stop to it.

Except Bruce had made changes to the system.
Nothing was where he remembered it.
Last time, he taken the whole network down just checking his e-mail. Who
knew what could happen if he tried unlocking a manor access-point.

The mysterious Frenchman Joker had greeted so
warmly was standing behind Harley, eyeing her in a way she found most puzzling
from a hostage about to die.

“You MUST be Harley Quinn,” he said finally.

“Ah, yeah,” she smiled. Didn’t everybody
know that? “You figger that out from the outfit?” she asked, flicking one
of the tassels on her hat.

“No,” he replied solemnly, “un derriere magnifique!”

“If Gérard Depardieu is the sexiest man in France,” Joker was saying,
plagiarizing Dennis Miller, “this whole Jerry Lewis thing is starting to
make sense… OH COME ON, THAT ONE WAS DAMN FUNNY!”

Neither Bruce, Gordon, Alfred, nor any of the
festival attendees saw the humor - although that was probably attributable to
the presence of the machine guns rather than absence of wit - or the fact that
most of them were French.

“Now, look,” Joker tried again, “this is to be the pilot
episode. I need a lively crowd.
I need everybody who’s not dead to seem NOT DEAD!
How about this, a little laughing gas to warm up the room, then we’ll
sing a few rounds of Frère Jacques and then we’ll kill Batman.”

“Kill Batman?” Harley repeated, awed.

“Kill Batman?” Gordon sputtered, confused.

“Kill Batman?” Alfred whispered, worried.

“Yeah, Batman,” Joker exclaimed, “He’s right over there.”
He waved vaguely, then addressed the room like they must be morons:
“The guy who’s been boffing Catwoman! Jeez, you people are slow
on the uptake!”

Gordon turned to Bruce with the idea of saying goodbye, when Joker continued:

“No, not him! HIM! Frenchie! The
Dark Kehnnnnigget!” And he pointed past Bruce at an astonished François de
Poulignac.

“Oh, COME ON!” Joker was nearly in tears now. “The Dark Kehnigget! Get it! Monty Python and the Holy Grail? The French castle? What’s wrong with you
people, this is killer stuff!!!!”

“Puddin,” Harley began tentatively,
looking at François (who seemed to be standing behind her no matter which way
she turned), “I don’t think this guy is Batman. Batman doesn’t have a
French accent.”

She also didn’t think Batman would keep eyeing
her bottom that way, but she didn’t say that.

Before “Puddin” could respond, there was a distant sizzle, a boom, a thunk
and the entire manor went dark. In
the blackness, there were cries of “Le tueur clown! Fuyez!
Séparez vous! A l'aide! A l'aide!”

There was a crash of broken glass, and a smooth
British voice: “Take that, you cretin.”

Then Anatole: “Sacrebleu, un grand cru, You smashed
a grand cru.”

Another crash, and then Alfred intoned:
“Once more into the breach, dear friends. God for Harry, England, and St. George!”

Thinking he had hold of the machine gun, Joker tried to fire the heavily
greased leg of lamb a la Anatole in the direction of Harley’s squeals.

Despite Jim Gordon’s proximity, Bruce had vanished into the first seconds of
blackness. He made his way quickly
to the grandfather clock and prayed the power outage would short-circuit the failsafes. A moment later, having
entered the cave without an obstacle and standing before the costume vault, he
reconsidered the prayer. His costume was missing.

When the lights came up…

A remarkably well-greased Joker lay on the floor
throttling a leg of lamb for no apparent reason.

A remarkably convincing Batman stood with his foot on the madman’s
back.

A remarkably threatening
Alfred held two thugs at bay with a broken bottle of Grand Cru.

And a remarkably unaffected François turned to a remarkably unfoppish
Bruce Wayne and said: “This is
a very interesting way you have to apprehend the criminals in America.
I do not think I could live here all the time.”

Within an hour, the police had come and gone.
The intruders had been cleared out, leaving a curious assembly of loose
ends:

Alfred calmed a hysterical Anatole, surveyed the carnage in the library, and
calmly suggested to François de Poulignac that tomorrow’s seminar be moved to
the south parlor. Though the
temperature was not so ideal, there would be no gunpowder or plaster dust in the
air to spoil the tasters’ palettes. François agreed, and complimented the
Englishman’s connoisseurship, and the two departed to view the south parlor as a
suitable venue, leaving Anatole to return home in a defeated huff.

Jim Gordon, watching the exchange, fished in his jacket for the Cumberland
and chewed the mouthpiece disapprovingly. “So
it’s to be business as usual at Wayne Manor,” he thought bitterly.
“Gun-toting psychopaths with video cameras run around trying to kill people?
Clean it up, dust it off, get everything ready for the next criminal’s
entrance…”

At this unfortunate moment, Selina walked in,
stepped lightly over the shards of a blood-stained brandy snifter, daintily
kicked the remains of the leg of lamb out of her path, and dropped six shopping
bags beside an easy chair. She
flopped into the chair dramatically and kicked off her shoes.

“Your daughter’s going to be the death of me,”
she told Gordon,
massaging her ankle, “Eight designers we went to this afternoon shopping for
the damn wedding dress, and that’s only half the list!
Do you know how many shades of white there are?
I do! There are 67!
It’s WHITE for God’s sake! Lace
or satin, cleavage or not, let’s go. But nooo…”

Gordon turned to leave, as Anatole had, in a defeated huff.
In the doorway, he barreled into Bruce and Batman (Bruce and
Batman, how the hell was that possible!) coming in as he was going out.

They each turned as he passed between them, grumbling “effete snobs think
they’re too good for regular people… lunatics out to kill regular people, c’est la vie…be damned if I’ll let this go on… over my dead body.”

Selina didn’t give the paradoxical appearance of Bruce and Batman walking
side by side so much as a second glance. It
was “Pheromones,” obviously, AzBat, and she didn’t deign to acknowledge the
imposter’s presence in any way:

“I don’t want to stir up the whole black-white-gray thing again,” she
said directly to Bruce, “but how in the hell can there be 67 SHADES of
WHITE?”

AzBat looked daggers at her. He had finally vindicated himself: he
had kicked the
Joker’s ass, got Bruce out of a devilishly awkward situation with Gordon - he
was the hero of the hour! And for
this he was to receive no recognition whatsoever?

“This is a crime scene,” he snarled in his best imitation of Bruce’s
batgrowl, “You not notice all the yellow tape at the door?”

Before AzBat could follow Gordon and Anatole in the cue of huffing exits, Selina
added, “Incidentally, Pheromones,
you shouldn’t hang around here in that getup. Dick’s picking Barbara up.
He sees you in that suit again,
there’ll be more broken things for poor Alfred to clean up.”

Bruce watched the exchange without
comment. He watched Selina taunt
Jean Paul for no reason except her own amusement.
Another time he might have intervened, but now that the crisis had passed,
he was reconsidering the Joker’s words about “the guy who’s been boffing
Catwoman.” Besides which, she was
right about one thing: if Dick saw Jean Paul in the Batman costume, there would
indeed be, figuratively as well as literally, ‘more broken things’ for somebody—but not necessarily Alfred—to clean up.

AzBat took Bruce’s silence for agreement and turned from his planned exit through the front door to a hidden
route to the cave.

“What I want to talk about is why
Joker is referring to ‘Call-me-Count’ de Poulignac as ‘the guy who’s been boffing Catwoman’…”

At this unfortunate moment, AzBat,
having found the post-quake remodeling had removed the route he generally took
to the Batcave, returned to the library, prompting Bruce to continue:

“…and while we’re at it, I
want to know what this ‘Pheromones’ business is about.”

AzBat watched in awe.
He had never fully appreciated the raw power and bravery that was Bruce
Wayne—to wantonly bait Catwoman that way was to unleash a force of nature.
Except rather than the volcanic eruption he expected there was a terse
and intensely controlled:

“I’m going to go back to the
beginning here because that’s how completely you’ve missed the really
important points: I spent hours today at Georgio’s, Fernando’s,
Anatelli’s, Anton’s, Chapel’s, Flavel, Wenelio’s and Mr. Jose at the
House of Shri while Barbara pretended to see a difference between 67 shades of white.
My feet hurt. I’m going
to repeat that last part because it bears repeating: My. Feet. Hurt. And I am
absolutely not going to put these damn heels back on to walk across that rubble
and kick your sorry ass…”

AzBat departed again in search of
the new entrance to the Batcave. Finding
only the washroom that eluded Harley earlier, he returned to hear…

“Okay, fine. I’ll make it simple, you can
hear about François or Pheromones, but both you’re absolutely not entitled to—”

“You’re not in any position to
be making deals, Selina, not after ‘the guy who’s been boffing Catwoman’ s'il
vous plaît…”

“I was shopping with Barbara!”

“…Diamonds on the Riviera and
totally nude on the left bank….”

“Samba band!
I’m changing my vote on the Samba Band.”

“Petit chat.”

“AND the groom’s cake, AND the
morning coats, AND the vows.”

As before, the mere mention of
“boffing” seemed to summon François de Poulignac from wherever he might be
lurking: “Ah yes, boffing,” he began without preamble, “this is like the
‘screwing around,’ no? This I
can explain.”

“Don’t help me,” Selina interrupted.

“It was that remark of the
laughing man, I thought it would cause some small consternation.
But…”

At this unfortunate moment AzBat
cleared his throat, thinking that this stranger might have the consideration
Bruce and Selina lacked to not have embarrassingly personal conversations in
front of him. The strategy
backfired as François enthused:

“Ah, but yes, we did not get a
chance to meet before. You are the
famous Batman, oui? I am Le
Comte François de Poulignac.” He
looked over at Selina with a smug “so there, didn’t even have to rob a
gallery” expression. “It is very suitable, I think, that we three should meet at
last…”

Selina massaged her eyebrows again
and whimpered, “How the hell did this happen?”

“It’s the curse,” Dick
announced flatly. He stood in the
doorway like a messenger in a Greek Tragedy, looked at each of his listeners in
turn—the solemnity of his statement may be guessed by the fact that he
didn’t so much as blink at the sight of Jean Paul in the Bat-costume.

“Bruce entertains—disaster
follows… It’s the curse.
The wedding is off.”